Ask an Italian collector where they stopped buying Banco records and a great many of them will say this one. Not because it is bad — it is the last good one, which is a different and sadder thing. It closes the decade the band had defined, it brought the singing back after an entirely instrumental album, and it reached number 36, the worst chart position of their career by a distance. Nineteen seventy-nine in Italy was the end of an era, and everybody involved could feel it.

The short version

Canto di primavera is the eighth studio album by Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, released in 1979 on Ricordi and produced by the band. Thirty-eight minutes, eight tracks. The line-up is Francesco Di Giacomo on vocals, Vittorio and Gianni Nocenzi on keyboards, Rodolfo Maltese on guitar, Renato D’Angelo on bass, Pierluigi Calderoni on drums — D’Angelo’s last, with Gianni Colaiacomo taking over around this time. It marked the return to sung material after ...di terra, the fully instrumental record made with the Orchestra dell’Unione Musicisti di Roma the year before. It reached number 36 in Italy.

La fine di un’era

To understand this album you have to know what preceded it. ...di terra in 1978 is possibly the most complex thing the Banco ever attempted: entirely instrumental, played with an orchestra, moving close to the great classical tradition with jazz colouring, and by some reckonings one of the highest points the band reached. Di Giacomo was set aside for it — and yet he still wrote the verses which, taken individually, form the titles of its seven pieces. So Canto di primavera is the voice coming back. The official line from the band is that it contains eight fresh compositions steeped in pastoral joy. Italian critics hear something else entirely in it, and both readings are in the record. What is not in dispute is what came next: after this, the live album Capolinea, then Urgentissimo, and a run of records in a commercial style a long way from where they started.

The sound

Shorter songs, warmer surfaces, and no suites — the longest thing here is six and a half minutes. The pastoral reading is not wrong: there is real lightness in it, and the band sound relaxed in a way they had not since before Darwin!. But listen to what the songs are about and a second album appears underneath the first, and it is elegiac. This is the Banco looking back at an era that no longer exists and at ideas that had seemed invincible and impossible to stop. Maltese is superb throughout and never once in the foreground, doing what he always did: embroidery, colour, light strokes in the background that illuminate the thing without demanding attention. And Di Giacomo has never sounded steadier, more sincere, or more aware of exactly what was happening.

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The songs

Ciclo opens. The title track follows at five and a half minutes. Sono la bestia and Niente sit in the middle of the first side. E mi viene da pensare is the shortest thing on the album at three minutes twenty and the reason to own it: a masterful ballad for voice and piano, the band’s most poignant backward look, with Di Giacomo singing that spring is inexorable and Vittorio Nocenzi letting himself go in a stunning final solo. It became another live standard. Interno città is the other peak, six and a half minutes of alienated walking pace and sharp denunciation, reading almost as an offshoot of La città sottile from Io sono nato libero, with words as cutting as any they wrote and sudden impetuous accelerations. Lungo il margine and Circobana close the record.

Reception and legacy

Number 36, against number 5 for the debut and number 4 for Darwin!, and the audience for this music had simply gone. The critical position has settled into something affectionate and clear-eyed: this is where the great period ends. Fans routinely describe their Banco collection as running from the 1972 debut to Canto di primavera and no further, which is a compliment to this album and an epitaph for what followed. The band kept working — Gianni Nocenzi left in 1983 to go solo and to test keyboards for Akai; five of them at various points played with Angelo Branduardi, who had translated their English album three years earlier. E mi viene da pensare and Interno città stayed in the set. The seventies closed and the Banco closed with them.

The verdict

For people who already know this band, and the right place to stop if you are working forward. E mi viene da pensare first, three minutes, and it will tell you everything about what this record is actually doing under the pastoral surface. Then Interno città. Then the title track. Then Ciclo. The 1972 debut, Darwin! and Io sono nato libero are the trilogy and nothing here competes with them, nor is it trying to. This is a great band writing an ending on purpose, in the year their entire scene stopped — and choosing to call it a song of spring.

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